intro
Hi, please bear with me as I learn how to post, mark up, etc. My name is John Moncure Wetterau. I grew up in Woodstock, N.Y., lived in Hawaii, lived for thirty-five years on the Maine coast, lived briefly in Dharamsala and Chang Mai, and, for the last five years, on Pam's houseboat in Seattle. I've worked at many jobs, mostly self-employed. I helped to raise a family and published ten books of poetry and fiction.
What else? A degree in computer science from the University of Hawaii. Four years in the U.S. Air Force.
I'm learning (slowly) how to draw. Here's a drawing of the Temple of Apollo on Naxos (Greek island in the Cyclades). We save our pennies and go to Greece every year. Since moving to Seattle, I've built two wooden dinghies---one for my son's boat and to learn about beauty, the other for Pam and me to row about Seattle waters.
I'd love to join this community, share what I've learned, and learn from you.
Named
Two women,
comfortably sixty,
“Oh, we see you
all da time walking.
Every day. We say:
look how straight he walk.
Straight walker!”
“Too old to bend over is why,”
I say. We laughing.
Only later I realize
what they have given me.
I am Straight Walker.
The Big Island
Hawaii
I wrote this twelve years ago when I lived on The Big Island for a year. I took a long walk every day to a cafe in Kapaau where I finished a novel. These gals were behind me waiting for coffee one morning. I am thanking them.
Port bow of the Iain Oughtred designed "Auk."
Our first voyage in the good pram, Pericles. Pam is holding up the stern light.
@straightwalker (28) hey did we play army back in Woodstock around 55? Sliding down the pine needles Hill on a cardboard box and swinging on a rope? Maverick Rd🚸🛣️ maybe it was swimming at Sully's🏊🏊♀️
Could be, but I don't remember. I was there for sure. Nice to hear the names, Maverick road and Sully's. I was there all through the sixties and wrote a short novel set there, a celebration, really, of that time and place: Every Story is a Love Story. It's one of my favorite books, as close as I could get to how it was.
@straightwalker (28) before the sixties Woodstock was an art colony that gave cabins with cheap rent to artists who were producing and wanted to place to concentrate on their work. A stepfather of mine at the time had been producing commercial wooden hand-carved bowls and wanted to move towards a more modern welded metal approach for which he would have to build a new audience, and rather than do that move to cabin up on Maverick Road and I spent a few Summers with my mother and him walking through the woods and riding my bike into town, going swimming or go to the movies ☺️ while I had friends there they were short-lived as I was only there when we would escape from New York City and between then and going back to Europe to go to school in England ✈️🚗🎪
Hey memes, that was a pretty good ride to the movies from Maverick Rd. In the daytime you might have passed me lugging golf bags on the course. Caddying wasn't a bad way to make a few bucks. I can still walk the course in my mind. It was beautiful, really.
Re: the city
I was born in the village in a hospital (French Hospital) that got merged into St. Vincents, I guess. My mother's parents lived in Woodstock, and I ended up there in fifth grade at the Shady one room schoolhouse. Very lucky for me, as I have both the city and the mountains in my early blood. My book, Every Story is a Love Story, is set in Woodstock around 64, 65, so it doesn't involve the fifties. I've been afraid to write about that time; it would mean living there emotionally for a couple of years. I hadn't yet learned how to please everyone and be Mr. BigFrog, a role which put me in big debt to whoever I wasn't yet and which came due to be paid in full one winter morning at Hamilton College when I woke up having missed advanced calculus (again) and heard a loud undeniable voice in my head: Get Out!
Forty-eight hours later I was hitch-hiking to Key West to look for a job on a shrimp boat. Left the Dean's list, the scholarship, the Psi Upsilon secretariat, the captain of the Onteora high school cheerleaders (then at Cornell), and started over.
I have started over since then, but never so absolutely. "Anything born is born naked..." I wrote some years ago at the end of a long relationship.
Sorry about the long ramble. Were you in the city during the great snow of '48? School in England must have been interesting.
@straightwalker (28)
I like that what an awesome beginning, you have to wonder what the Catalyst was especially considering the 60s emoji hippies with headbands and flowers in their hair dancing in the park, and it seems like some movie that you weren't the only one to head down to Florida the work on a shrimp boat and yes it was probably a long climb out of that one smiles ☺️
Reading and writing some of this stuff is kind of inspiring me to go through some old unpublished writing from the typewriter era and maybe regurgitate it onto this platform emoji man bending over with flying typewriters coming out of his mouth, and I like a good long ramble by the way and while I was there in the city or the Bronx to be exact in 48 during the Great Blizzard I certainly wasn't old enough to remember much about it though I do remember walking in the gale force wind and singing the Volga Boat song🚣♂️🚣♀️🚣🎯🎲
Life's a Gamble and there's always the road not taken